“When We Were Developing Series [2], We Were Very Conscious Of The Live Debate About What It Means To Be British”: Tom Hiddleston On The Night Manager’s 2020s Comeback

A decade after the British actor’s Golden Globe-winning turn as an accidental espionage agent conquering the illegal arms trade, the spy drama returned to its appointment viewing glory this January. The time since has brought new lead roles, blockbusters, marriage and fatherhood for the 44-year-old, and for his fictional counterpart, new targets, time zones, and temptations. However, Jonathan Pine’s appetite for righting the world’s wrongs never ceases, and neither does the human, classic touch of the man delivering his lines.

Is there a foundational centre to a human being? An incorruptible, unassailable, unpersuadable, unseducible centre? This question was a preoccupation of the late David Cornwell, better known as John Le Carré, the author of some 26 spy novels which have come to be regarded as the quintessence of the genre. This fascination with identity – the product of an unstable childhood and a career in the intelligence service during the Cold War – didn’t only begin and end with individuals, it extended to the very fabric of nationhood, too. What are the immovable facts of a place and its people, and what qualities or values bind us in a way that is powerful enough to resist the strength of what divides?

My breakfast date is telling me this, at a table in a delightful, if oddly retro, Primrose Hill café, when he interrupts himself to ask the waiter, “Do you have any English mustard?” As flavour pairings go, this feels like an insane topper for poached eggs, avocado and sourdough – but this is Tom Hiddleston, one of the UK’s most high-profile actors and, if previous magazine interviews are anything to go by, a paragon of Britishness. If it’s English mustard he wants, English mustard he shall have. The adjective ‘British’, or sometimes ‘English’ (although he is proudly half-Scottish), is repeatedly used to describe Hiddleston in a way which is more loaded than literal. It’s not just that he’s from here – it’s that he seems somehow to represent a British ideal. Is it his Etonian received pronunciation, his old-school manners, or the fact that he invariably looks as if he has a Savile Row tailor on speed dial that accounts for this perception? 

“What were we talking about? Oh yes, identity,” Hiddleston recalls, as he slathers the incongruent condiment onto his eggs. We’re here to discuss BBC’s The Night Manager, first adapted from Le Carré’s 1993 novel of the same name a decade ago, with its follow-up instalment – ten years in the making – concluding on screens days following our chat. Le Carré’s question, and the concept of Britishness, is interrogated at length in the show (“[The] England of green fields and croquet has been paved over,” Indira Varma’s character Mayra Cavendish comments in the first episode of the 2026 outing). 

For all the high-stakes warmongering and reckless jingoism, at The Night Manager’s core is a story about belonging and betrayal – who gets to be in the Old Boys Club and who is kept firmly outside. “Diego and I had a phrase that we kept returning to together throughout the shoot: ‘El que sabe, sabe.’ The direct translation is ‘He who knows, knows,’ but its meaning is more akin to, ‘It takes one to know one.’” Calva and Hiddleston talked at length about Teddy and Jonathan both being orphans. “They’re not literally orphans, but spiritually they are. They both feel alone in the world. Their privately held internal world is very solitary. The depth of those wells is profound.” He whips his phone out to show me some on-set photos of the two of them together, embracing, clearly connected by the enormity of the complex emotional bond their characters have – for better or for worse. “They see each other. It’s all very painful.”

It can get horny too. Clips of the two together, both in and out of character, have sent fans on social media feral. If you’ve not seen the sweaty, sultry nose-to-nose dance scene (with co-star Camila Morrone) from episode three, it alone is worth the licence fee. It feels trite to ask Hiddleston, a man who liberally peppers his chat with word-perfect stanzas of poetry from Mary Oliver and Charlotte Mew about why they decided, this season, for Jonathan to get a little gay with it, but, typically, his response is generous. “If you’ve got this double helix of secrecy and jeopardy, you can get very, very close to someone. There’s a thrill to it. And that risk is attractive.” Evidently, Calva brought a lot to the table: “Diego is a very instinctive type of actor. I think there’s a quality of stillness that he has, which allows him to communicate a lot with a little. His performance is about the complexity of his internal, interior world. And being less… northern European about his physicality was probably something that helped drive the emotional intimacy between the characters that you then see throughout the series.” Despite the turbulent kinship that grows between Teddy and Jonathan, ultimately the latter is able to easily infiltrate a world which the former longs to inhabit but can never quite access. Teddy will always be an outsider to the ruling classes, even in the eyes of his own father, who remarks snidely: “Teddy in the Athenaeum? I dread to think. No, Teddy’s a cowboy.” 

Although he doesn’t explicitly say so, one suspects that Jonathan Pine is the character he’s played who is closest ideologically to Hiddleston himself. “I think about my own connection to Britishness all the time. And what part of it I can connect to?” he says. “I love the Scottish rugby team and the English football team. Bagpipes make me cry. I love the landscape here, the way everything becomes a meme, our creativity and our sense of humour. But I feel very disconnected when ‘being British’ is used as a weapon. Any kind of intolerance, or othering, or a nostalgia for a thing that frankly never existed.”

Even the modus operandi of a spy inhabiting a new persona – learn it, forget it, be it – has echoes of the way Hiddleston’s early mentors taught him to act. One such mentor was Joanna Hogg, in whose first three full-length films, Unrelated (2007), Archipelago (2010), and Exhibition (2013), Hiddleston featured. At surface level, these films are about the quotidian interactions and dynamics of Brits of a certain class, but, as Hiddleston puts it, “their emotional reservoirs run deep. The way that Joanna works is fairly unconventional, in that she will direct A and Z, but it’s up to you how you get your character through the rest of the alphabet. You know where you need to end up, but you have to live your way through the story. So as an actor, I’m trying to draw a specific silhouette around someone and then fill it with the humanity required.”

Humanity has become something of a calling card for Hiddleston, who, even in his star turn as Loki in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is far more cerebral and nuanced than your typical supervillain might be. It’s this role that catapulted Hiddleston to international fame, first in 2011, in Thor, then through a further six features and a Disney+ spin-off series. In Ben Wheatley’s 2015 adaptation of JG Ballard’s dystopian thriller High-Rise, Hiddleston plays a doctor by the name of Robert Laing, who superficially opposes but later becomes complicit in the malfunctions of a society contained in a luxury tower block. With a Hiddleston-befitting clear-headedness, he refuses to lobotomise one of its disorderly residents by arguing he is “possibly the sanest man in the building.” However, Robert’s medical ethics later fall by the wayside as he becomes desensitised to the barbarism taking place around him. And in 2024’s The Life of Chuck – the screen take on Stephen King’s 2020 novella of the same name – the meaningful moments of an ordinary man’s life are distilled, not through words, but through an almost five-minute dance routine, performed by Hiddleston with great aplomb.

These are all characters, of course, and although the man himself is a little more of a mystery – having learned the hard way that being too much of an open book can bite you in the ass – there is a palpable empathy and compassion inherent in the way Hiddleston communicates. Jonathan Pine, over the course of The Night Manager’s two series, is repeatedly entreated: “Tell me who you really are.” How would Tom Hiddleston answer that question, I ask? “It’s hard not to be self-regarding with that, isn’t it?” he responds, thinking for a moment, before finding his flow. “I would hope it’s curious, playful, kind. A wise man once said to me, ‘The only meaning in life is to reside as a good object in the minds of others.’ That’s really stayed with me. To put your best foot forward and to live in such a way that means one stands a chance of residing as a good object in the minds of others. I am someone who tries to do their best. As a father, son, brother, friend, actor, whatever. Someone who tries to hold on to the good stuff. What else?” He searches. “Runner. Dog lover. Aquarian. To the extent that that means anything!”

Day-to-day life for Hiddleston is a surreal back-and-forth between ordinary and extraordinary. There is the bath and bedtime routine with the two small children he has with his partner, the actor and playwright Zawe Ashton. As well as copious watching and playing of sport (observe, if you will, his tennis serve in The Night Manager Season 2). And then the very modern lark of posting on Instagram, and “trying to figure out what role the internet should play in the fabric of our lives.” But then, too, trips to Guinea and South Sudan, alongside behind-closed-doors advocacy meetings as part of his long-term ambassadorship for UNICEF. White House Correspondents’ Dinners. Award ceremonies, where his wins have included that Golden Globe, an Olivier, and the much coveted Rear of The Year 2016. He has also recently wrapped filming on the snow-capped mountains of New Zealand and the Himalayas for Tenzing, which tells the incredible, improbable story of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s climb to Everest’s summit in 1953.

It’s enough to go to a man’s head. I ask him what his metric is for success. “That I’m allowed and afforded the opportunity to do this work is something I don’t take lightly at all. So I suppose when I finish, I have to ask: Did I commit myself with everything I have, with all my soul, with all my heart? Was I brave? Did I risk enough? Of course, I’d be lying if I said it’s not very gratifying when you hear that the work has connected with the audience too. Like the line in Howards End: ‘Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.’ But I’ve learned that that can’t really be the only measure for me. Because the work takes a lot. It requires a lot. It deserves a lot.”

Off-screen, Hiddleston’s status as a heartthrob is a product of his earnestness, a distinctly unthreatening sex appeal, and the fact that he looks as if 1940s-era Gregory Peck and 1990s-era Ralph Fiennes had a lovechild, and he grew up to fight in the Battle of Britain. All of that indefinable, old-fashioned British charm in spades, and yet there is one glaring gap in his resume which I simply have to get to the bottom of. Why has he never done a rom-com? He and Richard Curtis could make magic together. The question makes him belly-laugh, caught off-guard, but after a moment’s thought, he retorts: “I have! Much Ado About Nothing! I played Benedick!” He’s referring, of course, to his Theatre Royal Drury Lane run of Shakespeare’s play, 425 years after it was first staged. A more Tom Hiddleston answer you would be hard-pressed to find. 

The man’s got charisma, that much is true. His child-like sense of wonder at the world and wide-eyed sincerity are well documented, but still have the power to disarm when turned upon oneself. He is “honoured” at my pages of notes (which he says with hands clutched to his heart), every question I ask is “such a good one”, and, at the end, his review of our conversation is that it has been “just fascinating. Are you going to be okay transcribing all that?” If Jonathan Pine has a remarkable ability to charm, as even his antagonist Richard Roper observes, then so too does his portrayer. Richard Curtis, if you’re reading this, you have some calls to make. 

The Night Manager Season 2 is available to watch now on BBC iPlayer (UK) and on Prime Video (internationally). 

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